


Blade

by ssstrychnine



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Furiosa shaves Max, because I am trash I think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 19:09:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4071319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was written for a one-word prompt on tumblr. The word was 'shave'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blade

It’s six months before Max comes back and Furiosa almost doesn’t recognise him. He is a scarecrow in leather and linen, a shotgun in hand and blood on his teeth. His hair falls in greasy strands across his forehead, and his beard is full of dust and dirt. Furiosa is on gate duty and he is just some Wretched, just some sick-staggered traveller who happens to have a weapon. She keeps her gun on him as he stumbles through sand toward the gate 

“Please stow your weapon,” she calls when he is ten metres out. He stops, he looks at her, he stretches his hand out on the hilt of the gun, like he could no more holster it than he could pluck his head from his shoulders. Furiosa holds her breath. Then he sags, his body shifting down, into his shoulders, into his knees, like everything has been let out of him, and he puts the gun away.

“Furiosa,” he says, his voice a ragged croak, but loud enough, and she knows who he is. 

He walks beside her into the Citadel. They don’t speak; she watches him as he watches everything around them. The reservoir, the beginning of steps being carved into the stone, the bridges that criss-cross above them. The Wretched, carrying buckets of water back to patches of dirt. His hands twitch at his sides, tapping out some code that only makes sense to him, along the hilt of his gun or the stitches in his clothing. He looks feral. He looks like he did when she first saw him, strung up, medical equipment. 

“The girls will want to see you,” she tells him, as they step onto one of the lifts. Furiosa rings the bell and above them, those who are working the ballast for the hour, cast the crates of stones down, and they began to rise.

Max doesn’t say anything to her statement, just grunts, just slides his palms together then drops his hands to his sides. She wonders if he has a car, buried in sand somewhere. It doesn’t sit well with her that he might have thought to come to them on foot deliberately, like he thought they would take him as a threat. It’s true she hadn’t recognised him, but it still sits wrong. 

“I think you should get cleaned up before you see them,” Furiosa decides. “They’ll take to you better if you look as you did.” 

“I’ll be gone soon,” he mutters, and she looks at him sharply, and he looks away.

She takes him to the bathing rooms, hot water pools, deep in the rock, and she gives him a piece of pumice and some of the crumbling almost-soap Dag has been making out of rosemary, and she goes to find a knife. 

When boys born to the Wretched were old enough that they could walk, Immortan Joe would take them, and the Organic Mechanic would test their blood. Some of them were returned to their people and others were kept, and their hair was shorn, and their skin was painted white, and they became the pups. Furiosa knew this, though she didn’t know how their blood was different. She had shaved her hair too, when she stopped being a wife and started being something else. 

The children they had come back to have lost their paint, and their hair is growing back, and their skin is smooth of cut-out images. The knives for cutting and for shaving are kept in Organic’s old meat shop, tumbled in a drawer. It’s Cheedo’s now, and the Vuvalini Brigid’s, and the people who go to be healed are healed, and nothing is taken from them. Despite that, Furiosa still doesn’t like it. 

“Have these been sharpened?” she asks Cheedo, ghosting her hands over the silvery blades. 

“Tuk likes doing it,” Cheedo says, naming her ex-War Boy helper. Furiosa nods, and takes one, and presses her thumb to the blade until the skin splits. “Are you shaving your head again? I like how it’s grown.” 

Furiosa just shakes her head and leaves. 

Max comes out of the bathing rooms pink-skinned and dressed in his old, dirty clothing. Furiosa almost laughs, but his hair is sticking on end and he is wearing a ferocious scowl and she swallows it down and smiles instead. 

“Come to my room, you can shave,” she tells him and he follows her without a word.

Furiosa’s room is small, but she has a window, and she has a bed, and some water always. She doesn’t like having much more, only what can take with her if she has to leave. She points Max to the bed, and he sits, and she hands him the knife, and pushes the water bucket over to him. He looks at the knife, and at the water, and then at her. His hands are shaking so badly that the knife reflects bright spots of light across the walls. 

“You’re going to cut your own throat,” she says. “Give me the blade.” 

“I don’t need this,” he says, pressing his elbows to his sides, curling himself in. 

“I want to see your face,” says Furiosa, only realising that it’s true as she says it. Max goes very still. He hands her the blade. 

They sit on the bed, facing one another. Furiosa is on her knees and Max sits cross-legged. Dag’s soap wouldn’t work for this, not really, but his beard is wet still from the bath, and that’s all she had whenever she shaved her head. She cuts the hair shorter, and he’s almost himself then, deep lines around his mouth, dry lips and scars. 

“I can’t promise not to cut you,” she tells him, and the noise he makes is close to a laugh.

Furiosa drags the blade down one side of his face, the slight hollows of his cheek, the gentle curve of his jaw. He makes a sound, a sharp intake of breath, and the knife skips, and a spot of red blooms.

“Don’t move,” Furiosa says quietly, gently, and she isn’t sure why she should speak so soft, but everything about this feels like it needs silence. 

The stubble comes off easily under the blade, and when he is still again, she keeps going. It is strange, watching him come back to her, like wiping the condensation off a windscreen. She can see him now, the gold of his eyelashes, the spiky shadows they cast across his cheekbones. The darks and lights of his eyes. He bites down on his upper lip so she can get the place under his nose, and she rests her metal hand on his shoulder to keep herself steady. There are the remains of sunburnt skin, a slight peeling across his nose. Freckles maybe. Scars. She gently tilts his chin up before tackling the line of his throat, dredging up new skin. He smells of the rosemary of Dag’s soap, and of engine oil under that, and of sand. She cuts him three times, his cheek, the edge of his nose, the point where his jaw meets his ear, and he says nothing. 

When she is done, she puts the knife down, and neither of them move. Furiosa touches his face, the soft skin under his eyes; she presses her thumb to the corner of his mouth. His eyes drift closed, his eyelashes flutter, his breath is warm on her hand.

“Good as new,” she says finally, rocking back, away from him. 

“Thank you,” he says, and he opens his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I am sort of in assignment prison right now so am not writing as much, but that will be done soon! Yay! I'll probably put the other one word prompts I've done up here one day but for now they are on tumblr @ssstrychnine :)


End file.
